


Invocation

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:19:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>These stories made up the M.A thesis that I finished in August of 2006.  The book was called 'Our Lives Apart', and it told (or retold) the stories of (occasionally) famous women.</p><p>These kind of words often begin with invocations of the muse.  My muses, as ever, are the women who write songs - in this instance, Amanda Palmer, Tori Amos, Ani diFranco and Anais Mitchell.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Invocation

**Author's Note:**

> These stories made up the M.A thesis that I finished in August of 2006. The book was called 'Our Lives Apart', and it told (or retold) the stories of (occasionally) famous women.
> 
> These kind of words often begin with invocations of the muse. My muses, as ever, are the women who write songs - in this instance, Amanda Palmer, Tori Amos, Ani diFranco and Anais Mitchell.

Our story isn't a file of photographs  
faces laughing under green leaves  
or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving  
away, our story is not about women  
victoriously perched on the one  
sunny day of the conference,  
nor lovers displaying love: 

Our story is of moments  
when even slow motion moved too fast  
for the shutter of the camera:  
words blew our lives apart, like so…  
eyes that cut and caught each other,  
mime of the operating room  
where gas and knives quote each other  
moments before the telephone  
starts ringing: our story is  
how still we stood,  
how fast. 

-from “For an Album” by Adrienne Rich 

 

Oh, here, Muse, come lie with me while I’m sleepless. Come keep me company in clock-watching. This bed’s wide enough for me and you. Come with your scars and your hair in rag-ribbon curls. Come with painted eyebrows and clever hands and underwear more beautiful than anything I’d ever buy for myself. Come lie beside me and we’ll compare bellies and scars. Show me how to be imperfect but proud, because imperfections are something to be proud of…because we should wear our scars and scratches like maps of the places where we’ve been and where we’re going. 

And we have nothing to be ashamed of.  
Yes.

Lie closer to me and press you mouth nearer to my ear and tell me about how girls are made of finer things than carbon. Name my bones for me: the jazz bone, the helicopter bone, the raining bones and the bone where it is that love resides. I desperately want to know where it is that love resides in me. 

I want to hear about women who can do anything, grow wings as easily as some grow babies, shed skins and cultivate new ones just as fast. Those miracle women, who know nothing as well as everything, who were there with me on my travels. I carried them in my heart. Those activists, poets, dancers, lovers, mothers, sisters, daughters…the storyteller, the righteous babe, the librarian and my love, the astronaut. Remember when we sat cross-legged on scuffed wooden floors, bent heads in Somerville in summertime, when you were teaching me how to tell stories in the dark?


End file.
